Neo-Despotism as Anti-Despotism

The evolutionary ecology of despotism

In this paper, I investigate the relevance of recent work in reproductive skew theory to explanations of the evolution of social stratification in human societies. I briefly review human social evolution and corresponding increases in stratification, as well as recent developments in skew theory. I then attempt to integrate basic factors that have been a focus of interest by skew theorists to p...

Knowledge Integration – Balancing Between Anarchy and Despotism

A central issue in knowledge integration is how to achieve and maintain an optimal trade-off between differentiation and commonalization of knowledge. Too much emphasis on either side aggravates the efficiency of integration. The purpose of this paper is to make an inquiry into the trade-off problem from a particular theoretical perspective called the Activity Domain Theory. Two constructs from...

Dominance and Affiliation Mediate Despotism in a Social Primate

Group-living animals routinely have to reach a consensus decision and choose between mutually exclusive actions in order to coordinate their activities and benefit from sociality. Theoretical models predict "democratic" rather than "despotic" decisions to be widespread in social vertebrates, because they result in lower "consensus costs"-the costs of an individual foregoing its optimal action t...

Lechler ; Lachlan McNamee : Decentralized Despotism ? Indirect Colonial Rule

meaning transformation of "despotism" signifier and rising of the "iranian despotism" discourse

the purpose of this study is to examine the meaning transformation of despotism signifier from safavid era to the rising of iranian despotism discourse in qajar era. the method is archaeology and the study is focused on the relations of the meaning transformation with discourse practices. pre-modern texts were investigated for the significance of despotism. the results suggested that these sign...